However, Oracle did exactly that with PeopleSoft, by announcing a hostile takeover a price significantly below the going price at the time, and saying if they suceeded they would discontinue PeopleSoft's products.
I still don't know how Larry pulled that one off.
Obviously because it wasn't en vogue to criticize Oracle over anything, Microsoft has been the one everyone loved to blast in the software world, often rightfully so. If however Ellison succeeds, and again begins to approach Gates as the world's richest man again, as he did back several years ago when Gates started giving his billions away to charity, expect the media microscope to be pointed at Larry, and the shrewd moves he made to get back to the top, so maybe he feels guilty enough to give his billions away too.
I don't expect that though, this will probably prove to be a mistake for Oracle, trying to intermingle their extremely expensive proprietary products with the products of free software fanatics like Richard Stallman could be a disaster for those high margins he has in his other software products. We'll know if Larry really does mean business if he does actually wrest control of Linux away from the radicals, re-writing or replacing the GNU environment and casting Stallman's loons away forever. To "Appleize" Linux, will be his best chance.